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Abstract

Chinese

A lacuna in our understanding of how publicness of public transit is being constituted is the primary point of departure for this paper. In recent times, publicness has been articulated through two parallel readings – one, a political economic reading that sees publicness through static macrostructural constraints; and two, micro-sociality aboard public transit manifests an in situ and spontaneous public space. Moving beyond the static and the spontaneous, we articulate a dynamic co-constituted notion of publicness. Building upon recent work that examines the entangling of micro- and macropolitics onboard public transit and relying upon a mobile ethnographic approach revolving around situated observation and interviewing surrounding buses located in the Indian metropolis of Bengaluru, this paper offers publicness as a contingent entity that is constituted through the process of transiting.

Keywords

publicness public space public transport situated mobilities

Introduction

In the face of rising private automobile ownership, buses are central to international and national policies for sustainable transportation (MoUD, 2006; UNSG-HLAC-ST, 2016). Paralleling this policy interest is the prominence buses and public transit have received in sustainability discourses in transport planning (Banister, 2008; Santos et al., 2010). A political–economic analysis of transport governance locates public transit within wider macropolitical agendas that position cities within circuits of contemporary capitalism. In this light, inequalities within transit are inscribed through agendas that advance urban elite interests, simultaneously raising barriers and curtailing its publicness. At the same time, micro-level transitory interactions onboard buses are viewed as expressions of public space (Sheller, 2016) and constitutive of the everyday textures of urban life (Bissell, 2018). Micro-socialities aboard public transit manifest an in situ and spontaneous public space that reveals how societies are shaped into particular moulds through the politics of constraints (Söderström, 2013). Instead, we argue here that interactions in and around the bus can be seen as sites of entanglement between the molar and the molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). The molar and molecular do not exist in isolating silos, but operate at multiple scales, often crossing over and shaping each other (Merriman, 2019). Seen in this light, buses are sites of the molecular micropolitics of adaptability and situated resistance, but also the molar macropolitics of scheduling and fare enforcement. Therefore, we refrain from an exclusive emphasis on the molar or molecular, focusing instead on their dynamic entanglement. We address the gap in understanding of how publicness is constituted beyond static constraints or spontaneous occurrences, but through their relational interactions. We employ a contingent process to conceptualise publicness as co-constituted through the dynamic entangling of the molarities of macropolitics and molecularities of micro-encounters aboard Bengaluru’s public bus system.

Bengaluru, one of the major megacities in India, is unique in having a functional, nearly profitable, public bus system. The bus system’s relative financial success is attributed to its reorganisation as a state-owned corporation occupied with operational efficiencies even at the cost of labour relations and low-income commuters. In our fieldwork, we observed larger molar processes guiding everyday system operations. We were also able to experience the linkages between the molar macropolitical processes and their more molecular spontaneous outcomes through micro-encounters co-constituted dynamically in relation with passengers, the bus, and its staff. We use three situations –navigational, associational, and configurational– that manifested these micro-encounters as an analytical framework to gauge publicness of transit. This contrasts with more technocentric, data-intense models used to assess publicness of public space.

Following the introduction, we explain the methodological design for this research in the second section. We examine the growing scholarly interest in the publicness of public transport in the third section, locating our work in the midst of other efforts with its assessment. The analytical heart of this paper is the fourth section, where we propose three situational – navigational, associational, and configurational – moments associated with bus travel to assess its publicness. In the fifth section, we present the entanglement of politics through recent molar shifts in the constitution of bus-based transit in Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in south-central India. By organising rich ethnographic vignettes harvested aboard the city’s buses along the three situational moments, we reveal the linkages between system molecularities and molarities. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our research on the ongoing conversation on publicness in transit.

Methodology

Studying situated mobility on public buses contains challenges compounded by the difficulties of conducting interviews on-board crowded city buses but also from the anxieties participants experience when conversing in confined spaces. We used semi-structured interviews with passengers and key persons involved in the day-to-day operations of the buses. Together, these strategies help us produce situated and reflective micro-geographies on the ordering of publicness aboard public buses. We situated ourselves on public buses in Bengaluru on several days at different times during 2014–2017, performing participant observation. We were alert to the prospect of witnessing experiences related to boarding, alighting, ticketing, and sharing of seating/standing space. Although real-time (or slightly deferred) note-making has its advantages, in practice, conducting research on crowded buses proved to be a challenge. Notes were made at the end of the day, allowing for deep reflection on the situations encountered. Further, we triangulated the experiences aboard the bus through in situ semi-structured interviews with randomly selected passengers and drivers/conductors. In these interviews, we invited participants to reflect on practices aboard buses. Our interpretations of on-board encounters were often corroborated by interviewees. We also conducted key-person interviews with senior administrators of the bus system. These interviews located the bus system and its operation in the larger neoliberal discourse hosted and articulated in Bengaluru.

Publicness and public transport

Publicness of space is defined by multiple factors including ownership, universal access and the nature of activities hosted by it (Harvey, 2013; Low and Smith, 2013). However, the boundaries between private and public domains are not clearly defined and often support interesting societal functions (see Madanipour, 2003). Public transport, when ticketed, is not accessible to everyone, However, its publicness is usually assumed as a given on the basis that everyone can use it. The materialities and enclosed nature of the space in motion create the impression that the temporary fates of its passengers are tied together (Paget-Seekins and Tironi, 2016). Assessing the publicness of public transit at a macro scale has attracted considerable attention of scholars ranging from urban designers and transport planners to social scientists. On the one hand, urban designers seek to assess publicness through ascribed categories of meaning, control, and openness, often employing data-intensive models (Németh and Schmidt, 2011; Varna and Tiesdell, 2010). Meanwhile, planners assess publicness in the nature of institutionalisation of public transport (Paget-Seekins and Tironi, 2016), while for social scientists, accessibility is a key axis of publicness (See Kohn, 2004). Income, age and gender are often cited as barriers to the use of public transport, indicating their use as determinants of publicness (Mahadevia et al., 2013; Porter, 2008). Overall, there exist several divergent approaches towards developing a macropolitical understanding of publicness.

On the other hand, a situated, micropolitical approach to understanding publicness in transit is evidenced by the work of scholars such as Rizzo (2017) who highlight the contested and diffused nature of space on public buses. While spaces associated with newer transport technologies, such as metrorail, are more sanitised and policed (Sadana, 2010), the civility that is performed aboard depends on the type of transit and commuting environment (Bissell, 2016b; Butcher, 2011). Publicness understood as the sociality of the commuting experience (Bissell, 2010) is explored through two major themes – passengering (see Laurier et al., 2008; Russell et al., 2011; Symes, 2007) and affect (Bissell, 2010). Public transport provides the socio-material context shaping the performance of passengering (Ashmore, 2013). While the passenger is exposed to temporally variable sensory stimuli, the space around them is unceasingly and fluidly ordered through negotiation (Wilson, 2011). The inter-personal relations formed alongside the negotiated ordering of space lead to a shared sociality (Adey et al., 2012). Meanwhile, public transport spaces also produce or destroy affective atmospheres for mobile bodies (Bissell, 2010). They serve as the site for the performance of embodied identities and formation of intercultural relations. Unplanned encounters with strangers (Lobo, 2014) combined with normative behavioural codes (See Butcher, 2011) spark particular responses like ‘nice-nastiness’ that articulate co-presence with ‘different’ bodies in public space (Purifoye, 2015: 288). These two readings of publicness, while important, do not address the interactional relationships between macropolitical governance systems and situated micro-encounters aboard public transit.

Prevalent trajectories of research have resorted to two divergent readings of publicness – macropolitical constraints or a situational microsociality. This has left this research direction particularly susceptible to a macrostructural shaping or Bærenholdt’s (2013) charge of microsociological determinism. Do macropolitics entirely determine the outcomes of microsocial interactions within these environs? Or do situated mobilities operate independently of macropolitics? Recent analysis that draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) conception of molar/molecular entities is particularly insightful in the practice of politics in mobile settings. According to Merriman (2019), distinguishing between the molar and molecular requires attending to the perceptible and the imperceptible in movements. While molar mobilities are those visible, organised, and formally enacted in a situation, the molecular are the lived and experienced movements that usually bubble forth against the context of molar operations. Molecular movements are usually bodily perceptions that ‘are felt without being registered consciously’ (Massumi, 2015: 53). While, the molar movements are encoded in longer-duration ideological structures, for the molarities to predetermine the event or ‘be in effect… [t]hey have to reassert themselves’ (Massumi, 2015: 58). The assertions of the molar congeal into a top-down macropolitics, often initiated from above by policy makers, political leaders, bureaucrats and engineers, among others. When the molecular seeks to undermine the assertion of the molar in the situation, a micropolitics is unleashed. Micropolitical action always emerges in situ from within the collective participating in the event. Although these actions rarely register as conscious actions, they alter capacities of the collective, thereby enhancing or diminishing their abilities. The molar and the molecular play out together in real-time with top-down macropolitics inseparable from the micropolitics unleashed within situations. Indeed, according to Massumi (2015: 81) –‘[m]icropolitical and macropolitical go together. One is never without the other. They are processual reciprocals’. We thus propose that macropolitics operate reciprocally with a molecular micropolitics that springs forth within the confines of mobility systems.

If politics of mobility systems, understood in this light, is a result of the immanent entangling of molar and molecular movements – of reciprocal macropolitical thrusts and micropolitical responses, then how do molar governmobilities (Bærenholdt, 2013) intersect with micropolitics of molecular movements. Bissell’s (2016a: 398) response is that ‘Analyzing the politics of [the] event according to longer duration social formations such as identity alone fails to account for the micropolitical transitions that are actually taking place in the moment’. He adds that ‘[m]icropolitics refocuses attention from pregiven differences to the moment-to-moment transitions in power that give rise to difference. This invites us to appreciate the emergence of differences that mobility practices create rather than orienting analysis around the identities of the different people within the carriage’ (Bissell, 2016a: 399). In other words, Bissell suggests that the moment-to-moment transitions in power effected through a situated micropolitics offer an opportunity to appreciate the changing capacities and potentials amongst different commuters without anchoring those shifts upon accepted social identity formations. The attention to emergent capacities aboard transit is a critical development, while at the same time pivoting away from “pregiven” identity differences such as caste or gender. Cresswell’s (2010) conceptualisation of mobility as historically and geographically-embedded constellations is particularly instructive because it enmeshes transportation initiatives within wider governing rationalities or locally rooted dynamics of class and social identity. In this light, a molecular micropolitics of transit that discounts durable social categories runs the risk of not only disregarding tangible immobilities but furthering an apolitical and limited understanding of mobility.¹ Immobilities in transit, we suggest, remain tethered to social differences such as race and gender.

A strategy for analysing publicness

It is in this context that we propose an analytical strategy that not only assesses the power-laden process of bus-based public transit by grasping the entangled molar and molecular lines of movement, but also couples micropolitical transitions to durable social formations such as gender, age, and class to co-produce publicness on board buses.¹ We attend to not only the top-down designs shifting the contemporary molar realities of bus transit but also the situational and barely perceptible molecular movements that vibrate and resonate against durable immobilities. To serve empirical analysis, transit is uncovered here through three analytical situations –navigational, associational, and configurational. Collectively these situations describe facets that commuters experience in their way around and through the bus system. Drawing upon assemblage theory and actor–network theory (McFarlane, 2011; Müller, 2015), each situation is understood as a heterogeneous, relational achievement arising through the networking of a range of human and artefactual materials in the bus.

Navigational situations attend to wayfinding employed to move through the geographic space of bus transit. Borrowing from spatial analysis, we employ wayfinding as a collaborative process between the design and sociality of bus travel and an individual’s physiological capacities (Raubal and Egenhofer, 1998). The networked ontology for navigation is a sense-making process related to specific bodily situation (Gluck, 1991) but also in collaboration with the particular socio-material constraints and affordances offered in the navigational assemblage. In a similar fashion, associational situations arise through routine acts and practices of participating in the bus commute. These situations crop up in the context of actions such as purchasing tickets or observing other passengers on the bus. Participation is understood here in Marres’ (2012) sense, as social and material entities participating in the public life of buses. Material entities such as doors, windows, and handrails are ready participants intervening in matters of public concern that play out on the bus. Finally, following Suchman (2012), configurational situations arise when material and human practices constitute together the ideal figure of the passenger. Through acts of configuration passengers seeking to enter or stay on the bus are measured and if found wanting, face constraints that limit their access or capacities. We rely on these analytical situations to structure our empirical material.

Entanglements of Bengaluru’s buses

Buses remain the prime mode of collective movement in Bengaluru, albeit a mode that continuously contends with a surging growth in personal automobiles (48% moved by public transport compared to 45% through private automobiles [iDeCK, 2019]). Operation of buses in Bengaluru is located within a ‘constellation of mobility’ (Cresswell, 2010) marked by a historical context of governmental intervention at state and national levels. First, in 1956, the provision of bus-based travel was organised into a public entity – Bangalore Transport Service – within the operational control of the government of the state of Karnataka (Kasturirangan et al., 1997: 148). Second, in 1997 public transit was re-organised into the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) – a public corporation wholly owned by the state government (BMTC, 2013).² The latter shift was effected to introduce corporate-style ‘new public management (NPM)’– a strategy conceived by the state government to promote a more efficient technical administration (Chandrashekhar, 2011). Thereby, public transport in Bengaluru transitioned from a social service to a technical administration intervening through optimisation and technical fixes. Since the launch of economic liberalisation in India in 1991, composite logics of financial reform, privatisation, and commercialisation (Kundu, 2001) overlaid with aestheticisation imperatives of a bourgeois environmentalism (Ghertner, 2015) have diffused into infrastructure development. Since 2005, these logics have congealed into particular macromodalities of nation-wide intervention such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) (Gopakumar, 2015) that reform urban development (Mahadevia, 2006) to script the world-class city (Goldman, 2011).

Molarities

The layering of the macromodalities of reform and corporate re-organisation of bus-based transit in Bengaluru reveals specific thrusts that inspire macropolitics of bus travel. BMTC’s corporate status spares it from demands on daily operations from both municipal and state governments. This operational freedom gives the organisation the space to realise a transportation system that is notionally governed along technical imperatives of optimisation and efficiency. The flip side is the absence of government budget support in daily operations and system growth. With few government pay-outs, the imperative to balance revenue and expense flows has become an overarching one. This has primed BMTC to borrow funds either directly from capital markets or from reform-tied funding sources such as JNNURM (Interview with BMTC Managing Director). The combined imperatives of loan repayment and reform conditionalities impinge directly on fare collection and its mobilities through the bus into the organisation. Fare collection becomes a throbbing molar mobility distinctly visible in the everyday operation of buses, practices of how, when and where buses can be run and who can board and deboard the bus, and through it a vehicle for the exercise of macropolitics. One way the fare imperative has manifested itself is in the organisational relations the bus crew (usually composed of a driver and a conductor – the latter collects the fares) are implanted within. According to a representative of the left-aligned All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), BMTC’s recognised workers’ union, labour relations in the organisation are problematic on several counts (Interview with Union Representative). Employment conditions for many frontline workers have become increasingly precarious with far greater appointment of trainee drivers and conductors.³ Such trainee appointments are now prolonged over multiple years and are temporary with the prospect of abrupt termination. Given these insecure employment conditions, bus crews are particularly vulnerable to coercion and even harassment from inspectors and depot managers. The pressures of fare collection are evident in two organisational practices – schedules that govern bus operation and fare gathering.

Bus operation and fare gathering

BMTC buses operate along a fixed time schedule implemented at depots. This schedule governs the time the bus is expected to take from start to destination. Bus crews are required to keep to schedule and not doing so consistently affects their performance evaluation. Trainee appointees are particularly vulnerable to this requirement. Although, BMTC is expected to update bus schedules periodically, in actual practice that has not happened thereby allowing BMTC to operate routes with an unchanging number of buses and staff. An upshot was that drivers have had to keep to antiquated schedules often planned when Bengaluru’s roads were not quite as traffic saturated. ‘[B]us timings were fixed 10 or 20 years ago and to this day they [drivers] have to follow’ (Interview with Union Representative). With BMTC relying principally on fares to meet its operational expenditures and its loan obligations, plugging leakages in fare collection is a vital organisational priority that, quite often, is realised within an atmosphere of coercion and suspicion. Bus crew, especially precarious trainees, are inextricably embroiled in organisational practices that seek to maximise fare collection. Fare targets assigned by depot supervisors is one mechanism to manage crew performance. The inability to routinely meet targets opens the way for a variety of coercive disciplinary actions. Depot supervisors and staff are known to berate crew who routinely fall short of their targets. In extreme cases, harassment of bus crew by depot staff has happened. One male bus conductor at the AITUC union office spoke of ‘the depot staff examine us – touch pockets and clothes of conductors to make sure we are not hiding money’ (Interview with Conductor 1).

Bus design

The design of buses is yet another molarity that visibilises the macropolitics of bus travel in the city. Prior to 2008, Bengaluru buses were mounted upon a modified truck chassis that rode approximately 1200 mm above the road. Passengers rode high on these buses and this posed a challenge for several people including older adults and persons with disabilities. Another feature was that buses were furnished with entryways rather than doors. Direction boards were hand-painted and were displayed through the windshield or through a glass window above the windshield. All this began to change between 2008 and 2010, when BMTC acquired more than 1000 buses with funding from JNNURM. At any given time BMTC’s fleet averages around 6500 buses meaning the JNNURM buses account for a significant fraction of buses on the road. However, the largest influence of JNNURM funding was that it introduced a new aesthetic to the design of urban buses. The BMTC’s Managing Director described the paradigmatic change brought by JNNURM towards bus design as:

JNNURM was not just about giving you the funds and you buying something. It was about bringing a sea–change in the way [urban transport] was addressed.… Till JNNURM there was no concept of exclusive city buses in Bengaluru… JNNURM brought the idea that city operations require a new kind of bus. That was the time we went for low-floor buses… The body design of buses was given a new look so that people get attracted to these buses. Whole idea was that focus on the comfort level of the passenger, accessibility to different categories of users – senior citizens, physically handicapped (Interview with BMTC Managing Director).

A key design modification effected in the urban buses introduced through JNNURM was low or semi-low floor buses that were 900, 600 or 450 mm above the road surface. The lower floor was expected to make the buses more accessible for commuters. In addition, JNNURM buses possessed a wide central door of 1200 mm to grant simultaneous entry and egress to men and women (see Figure 1).⁴ The width of the doorway would ideally allow women to enter and egress on one side while allowing men to enter and egress on the other. Unlike with earlier versions, access in the current buses is controlled by the driver with a hydraulically operated door. The door was expected to increase safety by limiting accidents caused by crowding on the footplate of the bus. Yet another design modification was the replacement of hand-drawn sign boards with two digital signboards (above windshield and central door) that scroll the final and intermediate destinations in both Kannada and English languages. According to the union, BMTC’s actions are ‘publicity gimmicks’ and underlying ‘bankrupt concept of making profit … it has become commercialised’ (Interview with Union Representative). Seen in this light, streamlined technology designs proffered by low-floor buses might enhance the image of the corporation but they also further a profit-driven logic of commercialisation. These innovations are reflective of practices of assembling infrastructures through mobile best practices (Sadoway and Gopakumar, 2017) in Bengaluru – a city inextricably enmeshed in networked circuits of global capital (Brenner and Keil, 2014). The molarities of fare collection and streamlined design engender a macropolitics of bus operation in Bengaluru. We examine three situations as arenas of entangling where particular responses or lack thereof reveal how capacities of passengers can deflect or succumb to these macro-molarities.

Figure 1.

Juxtaposing a pre-JNNURM bus (top) with post-JNNURM bus (bottom) indicates a shift towards the streamlining of BMTC’s bus design.

Molecularities and their linkages with molarities

Navigational situations

The following describes a situation where the macropolitics of bus design, bus schedules and related anxieties play out to the detriment of commuters with non-normative bodily abilities:

One mid-morning in July 2015, I was traveling by bus 201A to Srinagara.⁵ The bus was not packed but neither was it empty. All seats were taken and there were a few passengers standing in the aisle. I was seated at the open window just behind the central automatic door. At a stop, a few people exited the bus. There were two people waiting to board – a young woman who quickly boarded the bus through the front door, and an older man who seemed a bit unsteady on his feet. The man took a few steps and gingerly stepped off the high pavement. As he approached the central door, he raised his hand to grasp the handrail but then peered at the scrolling electronic signboard above the door. He was waiting to read all the information on the signboard. Although the number on the board said 201 A, there are numerous 201 buses on this route. Each of them is distinguished from the others by a letter of the alphabet. The ‘A’ bus plies the route to Srinagara; not all the other 201 buses follow the same route. In the absence of route information at bus stops, passengers unfamiliar with the route have no choice other than reading the display board or asking the bus crew or passengers.

The signboard is bilingual: it usually scrolls the destination and route information in both Kannada and English. Thus, it takes a while to read all the information. Furthermore, given that the Kannada script is curvilinear, reproducing it on an electronic display is not ideal for quick readability. The man seemed undecided, unsure whether the bus will get him to his destination. The bus driver, who could see the passenger through his side mirror, was impatient to reach his destination and the bus started inching forward. The old man looked at me to ask a question but before he could begin asking, I had begun moving past him. At that point, the old man realised that he would not be taking this bus and lowered his hand. Sensing that the passenger had decided against boarding the bus, the driver turned his head toward the road and gradually accelerated the bus towards its destination. The man turned around and headed back towards the pavement.

This situation describes a drama where streamlined bus designs, outdated bus schedules and driver behaviour have conspired to reify inaccessibility for a passenger attempting to board the bus. While a digital sign board is said to offer greater clarity, challenges of readability remain and these often hinder navigating bus routes and directions. Compounding this is driver impatience precipitated partly by pressure of arriving on time at the destination. Inching the bus forward is a strategy the driver adopts to urge passengers to decide quickly. In a congested city, inching allows bus drivers to reconcile pressures of keeping to time with waiting for passengers to complete boarding. An adult passenger with full physical abilities might have been able to marshal the molecular capacity to arrest the bus, inquire with the conductor or a passenger, and then board the bus but a senior succumbs to the molarities of Bengaluru’s busing.

Associational situations

The following describes a situation where the macropolitics of fare collection meets the realities of gendered bodies experiencing everyday travel-related anxieties on packed BMTC buses:

One evening during rush hour in July 2017, I was traveling on the G4 bus from the city-centre along the radial Bannerghatta Road. During rush hour the bus fills up at the starting point with office staff and service workers heading home after a long day at work. I was lucky to have cornered an aisle seat across from the central door. A woman boarded the bus from the central door and moved towards the front of the bus (the area demarcated for women). Since all the seats were taken and the aisle further into the bus was already crowded, she planted herself a couple of rows ahead from me and grabbed the overhead handrail with one hand. A few minutes later, the woman handed over a 50 Rupee note to the conductor and mentioned her destination – Arekere Gate, a location about ten kilometres away. Wordlessly, the conductor, tore out the appropriate ticket from the bundle of tickets clutched in his hand, turned it around, using his pen scrawled the balance that was due, and gave it. The woman took the ticket and clutched it in her palm. As the bus wound its way to the destination, the woman watched her surroundings, occasionally stooping to place the position of the bus relative to her destination. The conductor, in the meantime, was moving around the bus, requesting passengers (especially men) not to crowd the central door. At most stops the conductor would disappear into the rear of the bus and then loudly beckon (male) passengers in Kannada “banni, banni, olgade banni jaaiga ide” (come, come, come inside, there is place).

About 45 minutes later, the bus was nearing Arekere Gate. By now, the bus was packed with passengers and evening had turned to night. As the bus approached the stop, the conductor disappeared into the rear of the bus and at the same time announced the bus stop with “Arekere Gate”. At this, the woman moved past other passengers till she positioned herself in front of the central door. With one hand on the central pillar, she dug at the shoulder of the man standing next to her, handed over the ticket and gestured towards the conductor, invisible behind the bodies of several male passengers. The man helpfully took the ticket stub, leaned over me and passenger behind me and wordlessly handed the ticket over to another man. The second man received the ticket and handed it over to a third man, who then nudged the conductor and gave him the stub. Meanwhile, the bus had stopped, and the driver yanked open the central door. Several passengers spilled out from the bus, while others moved from the centre to the rear. This was a critical juncture. If the woman exited the bus, the chain she had initiated would fall apart and she would lose the change due but at the same time if she stayed where she was, she risked having passengers board the bus and, in the crush, miss her stop. Instead, she took a step down towards the door, extended both her arms to grab at both handrails and said loudly “change kodi” (give the change). The conductor had, in the meantime, fished out the change from his satchel, scored off the balance on the stub and relayed it via the chain. The woman took the change back with a smile, climbed down the steps and disappeared behind the crowd that boarded the bus.

Fare gathering is key to BMTC’s survival. This manifests on the crew as an expectation to meet fare targets that depot supervisors impose. Gathering money from the travelling public and returning exact change is quite a challenge for bus conductors. One favoured way around this has been to postpone the payment of change till the passenger asks for it by showing the stub where the balance is scribbled. If the passenger chooses not to or forgets to demand this balance at their destination, it becomes extra money for the conductor to meet fare targets. Women needing to extricate change face an additional barrier in crowded buses if conductors are in the male zone of the bus at the rear. As one young woman passenger pointed out, ‘I will not go to the rear of the bus… We end up losing the change’ (Interview with woman passenger W1). The woman in this situation was determined to retrieve her money. She succeeded by stringing together a network of men who relayed the stub and change. At the same time, she enrols the guard rail and her posture to temporarily pause the boarding process. These molecular capacities allowed her to momentarily deflect molarities of Bengaluru’s buses.

Configurational situations

The macro-concerns of BMTC’s revenue targets imposed on its employees exist in a tense relationship with the mobility needs of non-full fare paying students in the following situation:

Early one afternoon in July 2016, I was traveling by 366Y. The bus was not empty, and I was standing in the middle of the bus near the central door watching the street scene. Schools had ended for the day and students were congregating at bus stops, waiting for a bus. The next stop was East End Circle, a large bus stop adjoining the intersection of a major radial road and the ring road and located close to a major public hospital and several schools. The stop was packed with school children. There were a couple of buses already stopped at the bus stop. The conductor announced the bus stop with “East End, Jayadeva Hospital”. Some passengers got up from their seats and moved towards the door, while others adjusted themselves to the crush of children expected on board.

However, instead of stopping the bus at the stop, the driver continued driving, stopped the bus a good 50 metres beyond the bus stop, and then opened the central door. Seeing the bus slow down and stop, several adult men and older schoolboys began running for the bus. As soon as the bus door opened, those at the door helpfully got down from the bus for exiting passengers. Meanwhile several commuters reached the bus and clambered aboard. A larger crowd of schoolgirls, small children with mothers carrying their bags and water bottles were seen heading for the bus. The driver began inching the bus forward with the door gradually closing. A few older children and adults continued boarding the moving bus with its constricting entry. Eventually, the driver shut the door and the bus gathered speed. The school children and their mothers gave up the chase for the bus and headed back to the bus stop. On board the bus, the conductor was making the rounds requesting tickets. As the conductor approached, schoolboys flashed their cellophane-wrapped student pass. The conductor examined each pass, returned it and moved on. No fare was collected from school children.

This situation is common in Bengaluru and reveals of which commuters are configured as passengers. In times when fare gathering is vital to institutional survival, meeting revenue targets and keeping to schedule acquire extraordinary importance for bus crews. School children invariably carry monthly passes and thus do not pay fares for each trip they make between school and home. At the same time, the bodies of school children encumbered with their bags and bottles displace full-fare paying customers. This tangibly diminishes the fare gathered by the bus crew, exposing their performance to scrutiny by the organisation. Actions of configuring passengers allow bus crews to maximise their fare targets and thereby avoid organisational scrutiny. The bus crew work in concert to restrict pass-holding school children thereby guaranteeing more space on the bus for others. Use of automatic doors enrols technology to further an operational objective while reifying inaccessibility. During an interview, one mother said ‘bus drivers and conductors do not stop the bus at the bus stop… The driver sometimes closes the doors to prevent children from boarding the bus’ (Interview with woman passenger W2).

Conclusion: Buses and publicness

Based on our empirical study in Bengaluru, this paper offers a contingent and processual framework to record the entangling of macropolitics and micropolitics on board buses and as a means of assessing their publicness. Rather than a utilitarian reading of travelling between origins and destinations, this paper seeks to offer up a process imbricated with politics. Seen in this light, bus travel manifests a dynamic and entangled politics of publicness that is an advance over the static macro-structured or a spontaneous microsocial understanding. Bus commuting visibilises the entanglement of the top-down nature of regulation of transit spaces with microsocial interactions aboard buses. We develop an understanding of publicness that is neither a static macrostructured entity nor a spontaneous outcome of microsociality. Instead, based on the three empirical situations of navigation, association and configuring entangled with the molar politics of fare collection and streamlined design, a contingent publicness – co-constituted by macropolitics and micropolitics – is laid bare.

At a policymaking level, the expansion of accessibility to non-normative bodies needs a deeper understanding and engagement with the idea of distributive justice and equity in transportation (Pereira et al., 2017; see also Verlinghieri and Schwanen, 2020). Molecular situations create an interesting way of thinking about mobility justice that goes beyond the mere molar availability of transport infrastructure (Barber, 2020). Molar shifts in bus design have visible impacts on the composition of the ‘public’ on board as the streamlined new buses ‘work better’ for the young, adult male passenger. Passengers figured differently from this idealised type must contend with macropolitical thrusts that discipline and structure their experiences on board. However, micropolitical capacities occasionally allow individuals to circumvent the macropolitics that structure their experiences. This introduces an element of contingency in publicness on public transit that is structurally shaped but not completely determined. Some non-typical passengers possess the capacity to deflect the structures that constrain publicness.

In this context, if the remit of planners, policy advocates, and designers is to enhance publicness on board, the interventions would need to be at different levels to collectively address the molar and molecular aspects of mobility, challenging the status quo of transport policymaking while aspiring for distributive and epistemic justice outcomes (Smeds et al., 2020). These interventions must address the composite situations characterised here as navigational, associational, and configurational while also addressing the molar constraints at play in buses. The mobilities turn offers insights into how plans, policies, or designs could govern urban mobilities. A key insight is the dislodging of the rational individual who animates and embodies planning and policy-making processes (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2020). Recent calls for a material pragmatist approach to urban mobilities design are particularly heartening (Jensen, 2016, 2018). In particular we identify with the potentialities of examining the entanglements with the material through modes of co-design or participatory design to fashion more just material contexts. This appears to be a tall order. For instance, the elderly gentleman at the bus station missed the bus as he could not read the electronic scrolling route board in time. His attempt at boarding the bus was thwarted first by an inability to peruse the scrolling electronic display board and then by the bus driver inching the bus forward to protect his time schedule. The static hand-painted vernacular display board that was displaced by the electronic display board would have served him better. However, policy mobilities from the Global North enabled the latter ‘best practice’, leading us to join scholars such as Temenos and McCann (2014: 580) in asking ‘best for whom’? It also reveals frictions between localised and globalised imaginations within the ‘glocal’ hybrid of the city strategically located at the junction of transnational flows of information and capital (Gopakumar, 2020). These questions are important in the space-time where elite and subaltern mobilities are increasingly entangled

Greater efforts are needed towards the design scrutiny of navigational aids such as signages, lights and architectural design to improve the navigational capacities of commuters. In order to improve the associational situations of commuters on the bus, we need to engage further with debates on fare collection. A limited, technocratic view of commuting as mere movement between origins and destinations, paid for through routine collection of fares, ignores the cultural practices and networks that produce transit and indeed, city space (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2020). Sparking conversations on the molarities of fare collection could surface multiple molar alternatives, including making public transport free or raising financial resources needed for operations by levying public transport tax on private motorcars (see De Witte et al., 2006) or alternate means of collecting fares such as pre-paid fares, and on-board tapping of smart RFID cards (see Thøgersen, 2009). By emphasising the service over profit motive, increasing the frequency of bus services on routes serving vulnerable groups, training bus staff regarding their primary responsibilities towards passengers, we could improve the configurational situations for commuters at risk of exclusion.

This article adds to the growing scholarly engagement with the constitution of publicness aboard public transit. In a departure from other efforts, we unravel the entanglement of macropolitical thrusts and micropolitical responses shaping publicness by deploying a situational understanding of such interactions. Our work prepares the ground for a deeper engagement with the molarities and molecularities of geographies of commuting.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,Grant No. 435-2020-1112.

ORCID iD

Yogi Joseph

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